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On September 18, Iranian-born, Dallas businesswoman Anousheh Ansari (bio here) and two astronauts are scheduled to blast off in a Russian Soyuz TMA-9 spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Ansari replaced Japanese-born businessman Daisuke Enomoto, who was pulled from the flight for medical reasons. The Iranian news media has not made too much of the first Iranian woman scheduled to go into space, but there have been a number of reports about it and this Iranian space site has a number of pictures. So it is interesting to me that one of the photos has clearly been photoshopped...

NEWSWEEK “Isikoffed” the Gonzales Memo Since Christopher Hitchens is correcting old Dowdified quotes, I thought I’d correct one myself. This one, from a 2004 NEWSWEEK article, is a major Dowdification — in my view, every bit as egregious as Dowd’s original. What’s more, it’s still influencing lefties even today. Worse, unlike Dowd’s alteration of a Bush quote, the NEWSWEEK story didn’t even use an ellipsis to indicate what was missing. By altering an Alberto Gonzales quote in this way, NEWSWEEK managed to make Gonzales and the Bush Administration appear unreasonably dismissive of the Geneva Convention. The story was co-authored by...

Let’s Read the G.O.P. Tea Leaves (5 Letters) To the Editor: In “How to Win by Losing” (Op-Ed, Sept. 13), Ramesh Ponnuru argues that Republicans could “win by losing” if they fail to maintain control of the House but keep the Senate in 2006, because this would put the G.O.P. in a better position to win in 2008....

TORONTO -- Five years after 9-11, it's apparent that we all aren't getting along. And the political left is throwing plenty of mean punches. A case in point is that new Bush snuff movie, "Death of a President." Some might say that "snuff movie" is too strong a term -- but how else to describe a movie that clearly revels in the prospect of George W. Bush's being assassinated? Anyone who doubts that movies still have the power to stir up passions ought to come here, to the Toronto International Film Festival, which rates as the most important movie conclave...

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Oil prices nudged higher for a second day on Monday, struggling to end their steepest slump in more than a decade amid robust winter fuel stocks and easing geopolitical and weather risks to oil supplies. NYMEX crude for October delivery was up 15 cents at $63.48 a barrel in Globex electronic trading by 2310 GMT, building on Friday's 11-cent gain and again attempting to halt a $9 collapse in prices over the past three weeks and a near 20 percent reversal since mid-July's record high $78.40 a barrel. From peak to trough, oil prices have fallen by...

Yesterday, Slate posted this piece criticizing Frank Rich's New York Times column about the 9/11 photo shown here. The picture was taken by Magnum photographer Thomas Hoepker on the afternoon of 9/11. Calling the image "shocking," Rich suggested that the five New Yorkers were "relaxing" and were already "mov[ing] on" from the attacks. Slate's David Plotz disputed that characterization of the picture, arguing that the subjects had almost certainly gathered to discuss the attacks and to find solace in others' company. Rather than showing callousness, as Rich suggested, it depicted civic engagement. But since neither Rich nor Plotz knew exactly...

The percentage of Americans who blame the Bush administration for the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington has risen from almost a third to almost half over the past four years, a CNN poll released Monday found. Asked whether they blame the Bush administration for the attacks, 45 percent said either a "great deal" or a "moderate amount," up from 32 percent in a June 2002 CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll. But the Clinton administration did not get off lightly either. The latest poll, conducted by Opinion Research Corporation for CNN, found that 41 percent of respondents blamed his...

PARIS - The nations of the world joined Monday in solemn remembrance of Sept. 11 — but for many, resentment of the United States flowed as readily as tears. Critics say Americans have squandered the goodwill that prompted France's Le Monde newspaper to proclaim "We are all Americans" that somber day after the attacks, and that the Iraq war and other U.S. policies have made the world less safe in the five years since. Heads bowed in moments of silence in tribute to the 3,000 killed in the attacks on New York and Washington — while a top al-Qaida leader...

With virtually no questions asked, an undercover ABC News team was able to purchase a half ton of one of the world's most dangerous bomb-making materials and move it into a storage shed only a few miles from the White House and the U.S. Capitol. Despite its use in the bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building, there are still no federal laws restricting the purchase of ammonium nitrate, a chemical fertilizer, widely sold at farm supply stores. The ABC News undercover team made the purchases, in cash, at farm supply stores in North Carolina and Virginia and were never...

(Ignoring the blather on Immigration and Impeachment, I proceeded to the Idiotorial remarks on the CIA leak postscript from the Houston Comical - weegee): -------------------- With the latest developments in the CIA leak case, some Bush apologists insist that it's time for a correction or contrition from those of us who spoke out about the White House's involvement. At least as far as my commentary has gone, I see no required rollback. Bush has not taken the "appropriate action" that he promised in October 2003, as Karl Rove remains on the White House payroll. Disclosure that Richard L. Armitage, when...

BRIDGEPORT, Conn. -- The owner of DataUSA Inc., a company that conducted political polls for the campaigns of President Bush, Sen. Joe Lieberman and other candidates, pleaded guilty to fraud for making up survey and poll results. Tracy Costin pleaded guilty Wednesday to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Costin, 46, faces a maximum of five years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000 when she is sentenced Nov. 30. As part of her plea agreement, Costin agreed to repay $82,732 to the unidentified clients for 11 jobs between June 2002 and May 2004. DataUSA is...

BRIDGEPORT — A polling company owner admitted participating in a conspiracy to falsify data in order to meet deadlines for clients, which included the campaigns of President Bush, U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman, U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro and Mayor John M. Fabrizi. Tracy Costin, 46, of Madison, admitted to U.S. District Judge Janet C. Hall that she participated in a conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Costin, who owned and operated DataUSA, a survey and polling firm with offices in West Haven and Guilford, faces up to five years in prison when she is sentenced Nov. 30. However a preliminary calculation of...

The owner of DataUSA Inc., a company that conducted political polls for the campaigns of President Bush, Sen. Joe Lieberman and other candidates, pleaded guilty to fraud for making up survey and poll results. Tracy Costin pleaded guilty Wednesday to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Costin, 46, faces a maximum of five years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000 when she is sentenced Nov. 30. As part of her plea agreement, Costin agreed to repay $82,732 to the unidentified clients for 11 jobs between June 2002 and May 2004. DataUSA is now known as...

<p>Conspiracy theories flourish in politics, and most of them have no more basis than spring training hopes for the Chicago Cubs.</p> <p>For much of the past five years, dark suspicions have been voiced about the Bush White House undermining its critics, and Karl Rove has been fingered as the chief culprit in this supposed plot to suppress the opposition.</p>

Forget the Reuters “fauxtography” scandal (well, don’t actually forget it) — the Dylan world is rocked this morning by a completely unsourced quote published in the Christian Science Monitor, in an article that attempts some kind of overview of Dylan’s career coinciding with the release of Modern Times . (Thanks to RCB for the tip.) Here it is, in context (bolding mine): Dylan, who declined to comment for this article, remains, as ever, an enigma. (Three years ago, he called himself “a 62-year-old Jewish atheist.'’) But he’s more open than he’s ever been about his past, even opening himself to...

Did anybody watch any of the cable nets today? I watched a few minutes of MSNBC and CNN which is rare and I noticed the new talking point coming from the different talking heads and the reporters was the word rubber stamp. The new startegy for the Rats apprentely is to label any Pubbie running for reelection as a rubber stamp to GW Bush and his policies. Keep your ears open for that in the next few days. I bet Rush picks up on it for his show Tuesday.

<p>WE'RE RELUCTANT to return to the subject of former CIA employee Valerie Plame because of our oft-stated belief that far too much attention and debate in Washington has been devoted to her story and that of her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, over the past three years. But all those who have opined on this affair ought to take note of the not-so-surprising disclosure that the primary source of the newspaper column in which Ms. Plame's cover as an agent was purportedly blown in 2003 was former deputy secretary of state Richard L. Armitage.</p>

Abe Lincoln once posited an interesting conundrum: Q. If you call a tail a leg, how many legs has a dog? A. Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg! It apears that every few months or so a five-legged dog decides to run amok in our country and kill people - often of Jewish extraction - prompting the media to do its best to withhold certain details which might cause the public to jump to certain wildly unreasonable conclusions. Case in point: yesterday a 29 year old man in San Fransisco was arrested on 14 counts...

IT'S bad enough that friends of Hezbollah terrorists could trick so many journalists with just a tall story and a rusty Lebanese ambulance. Worse is that some of those journalists seemed so eager to believe this ambulance was indeed wickedly blown up by an Israeli missile fired straight through the big red cross on its roof -- leaving not even a scorch mark. But worst is that even now that this hoax has been exposed, none of the countless writers and commentators who fell for it have admitted to passing on as fact the propaganda of terrorists. It is this...

The media war against Israel Early in the recent Lebanon war, the blogosphere revealed the fabrication of images by Reuters, whose reputation is now in shreds among those dwindling numbers in the western mainstream media who still acknowledge there is such a thing as the truth. Since then, the nature and scale of the various frauds perpetrated by the media during that war put those doctored Reuters pictures into the shade. The western media are no longer merely producing questionable professional practices in reporting a war. They are now active participants in it — and on the wrong side of...